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The house that reflects America: United in its diversity, the best of the country is yet to come

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The house that reflects America: United in its diversity, the best of the country is yet to come

The American pledge of allegiance vows fealty to “one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”. Implicit in this oath, which was conceived in 1892 and adopted in 1942, the American Republic is divinely ordained to be united. Yet, in recent times there has been talk of a “Divided States of America” because of the political dysfunction in the country. From books and documentaries bearing that title to a Time magazine cover captioned “President of the Divided States of America” when Donald Trump was elected in 2016, the idea of a cohesive, united America is not a given anymore.

So, could the United States cleave, splinter or fragment into two or more countries? Unilateral secession was ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in a 1869 (Texas vs White) case following the Civil War. But that has not prevented occasional fissiparous expressions, including sporadic but small secessionist movements, from festering in some pockets of the country. Nothing serious enough to give Washington DC a headache, but a reminder that beneath the promise of the American dream and the hum of everyday life lies a wee bit of dissonance and dissent.

Lately though it is not these pockets of secession that are making headlines but a broader social, political, ideological and even geographical chasm that has opened up in self-avowedly the “greatest country on earth”. The schisms are dark, ugly and deep: Conservative Middle America vs Liberal Coastal America; Urban America vs Rural America; Mostly White America vs Black/ Brown/ Hispanic/ Coloured America; Insular America vs Globalised America; Better educated and wealthier America vs Less educated, poorer America.

Illustration: Ajit Ninan

These divisions have always existed. But the arrival of Trump as a political force by tapping into the angst of the poorer, marginalised Americans resentful of coastal elites powered by globalisation aggravated them even more. Why would Trump do that even though he is a beneficiary of the system that gave the coastal, liberal elites a leg up while largely ignoring the problems in Middle America? Change of heart? Cynicism? Or …?

The more conspiratorial theory currently doing the rounds is that Trump is a cat’s paw for Russia seeking to avenge the American-engineered breakup of the Soviet Union that reduced Moscow to a second-rate power. Serial episodes of Trump softballing, if not coddling Moscow, have convinced many that he is a Russian stooge helping break up the United States – a Siberian insider on the lines of the Manchurian candidate.

Late night riffs, cartoons and spoofs implying treason have flooded social and political discourse, from cards showing “Treason’s greetings” from the Trump family during Christmas and New Year, to a more recent meme showing the Kremlin as a backdrop to Trump’s State of the Union address. No president in American history has been accused, and perhaps vilified, more directly and frequently of treason as Trump.

Trump has also aggravated the growing divisions within the country with broadsides directed against not just the liberal elites with Democratic Party orientation, but against cities and states he deems as their bastion. From deriding cosmopolitical mixed-race cities such as Chicago for their high rates of gun violence to threatening to withhold disaster relief money to California, a state that is more wealthy and productive than all of Trump’s redoubts put together, he has proved to be more of a divider than a uniter that all presidents pledge to be. In any other country such slights would have been the spark for secession, but the United States is held together as much by the American Dream (and McDonald’s, joked someone) as the idea of liberty and justice for all.

The more prosaic reason for the growing divide and dissonance within the United States is the untrammelled globalisation and the migration that has come with it, threatening a conservative population unequipped and unprepared to meet the challenge. It is no secret that newer and first-generation immigrants work harder and are more successful than previous generations. Many American nativists have forgotten that not only is the United States built on immigration, but their forebears were also immigrants, something Native Americans (erroneously dubbed “American Indians”) took care to remind them during a recent face-off when a high-school punk faced off with a tribal original.

The recent mid-term Congressional elections have shown decisively that the demographic changes brought about by decades long immigration are starting to reflect in the House of Representatives. One of the more iconic photographs as the House convened last week showed three lawmakers – Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex, a Latina-American, Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian-American, and Ilhan-Omar, a Somali-American – working together in a chamber that is more reflective of the changing demographics of the country.

Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib will be joined by Representatives Ayanna Pressley and Stacey Plaskett (both African-American Congresswoman), Raja Krishnamoorthi and Ro Khanna (both Indian-Americans) among others on the House Oversight Committee that will have the powers to issue subpoenas and launch wide-ranging investigations into Trump administration shenanigans.

All this is deeply unsettling to the traditional white establishment that has bossed over the country for decades, and whose overlordship is reflected in the less representative (and mostly white) Senate, where each state gets two lawmakers regardless of population. More shocks are in store. Who would have imagined a presidential election field would have four women – possibly more – in the mix, including two named Kamala and Tulsi? Trumpian times are just an aberration. United in its diversity, the best of America is yet to come.